Google’s Gmail crashes

Bay Area night owls who use Google’s Gmail were out of luck early this morning. The service was down for two and a half hours worldwide, starting at 1:30 am.

There was no explanation from Google about the cause of the outage in its original blog post about the problem. Google subsequently said that service has been restored, and at least in terms of my account, the statement seems to be true.

Here’s some of what what Google had to say about the outage, along with its apology:

“Before you can access your Gmail, you may be asked to fill in what’s called a ‘CAPTCHA’ which asks you to type in a word or some letters before you can proceed. This is perfectly normal when you repeatedly request access to your email account, so please do go through the extra step – it’s just to verify you are who you say you are.

“The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.

“Obviously we’re never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence. We know how important Gmail is to you, and how much people rely on the service.”

It’s am embarrassing failure for Google, which is pushing its cloud computing initiative that calls on consumers to store all their data – from spread sheets to documents – on the company’s servers and then access it online.